CPU Names: Why Are They Called Pentium, Athlon, etc.?

Nowadays we use names like Pentium or Ryzen practically every day, and in the hardware world we are used to using specific names to call the CPUs of the manufacturers -primarily, Intel and AMD– but, have you ever wondered where do these names come from? In this article we are going to satisfy your curiosity about it and we are going to tell you why processors are called what they are called.

Most users use the products without knowing much beyond their technical characteristics at most, but few know the origin of the trademarks and the many curiosities they contain. We are therefore going to review at least the best-known trademarks and explain why they are called what they are called so that you can know their origins a little better.

CPU Names

The origin of the most popular CPU names

Let’s start by talking about the Intel Pentium processors , possibly the best known CPU brand because they were the ones that followed the famous 486, where Intel broke their nomenclature for the first time since in theory these processors should have been called 586.

Before the advent of this trademark, Intel processors simply used a numeric code in their nomenclature, something that was very common at that time. Thus, we had processors like the 8086, the 286, 386, 486…. and instead of 586 came the Pentium brand that is still used even today. This name comes from the Greek word “pente” which means “five” and the Latin ending -ium to form a neuter name. So, as you can see, Intel did not completely “break” with the 80×86 naming nomenclature.

We continue with Intel with their Celeron processors, which they also continue to use today. This is the low-cost version of the Pentiums that were named after the Latin root “Celer” which means fast since at that time the operating speed of the processors began to skyrocket, and with the Celeron Intel had the “throne “of the fastest processors of the moment.

Intel Celeron

Other Intel processors are Xeon , reserved for the professional environment but still used today. First introduced in June 1998, these processors were based on the same architecture as the desktop processors but with more cores, more cache, support for ECC memory and in greater numbers, more PCIe lanes and a long etcetera. That is why the name Xeon comes to mean something like strength and reliability.

Intel Xeon

We move on to AMD with their famous Athlon processors, which they also continue to use even in this modern age. This trademark is a name that comes from ancient Greek and which means “prize, trophy, reward” but also “contest, tournament, competition”, and as you may suppose it is called that because when they were introduced they expected to present strong competition to Intel (and take the “award” to the best processor, of course).

We continue with the Duron and Sempron processors of the brand, also registered names that have to do with their robustness, durability and reliability. Although there is not a completely concise explanation regarding the names of these CPUs, it seems that Duron comes from the Latin “durare on” or durable unit; For their part, the Sempron processors that were their successors, have a name that comes from the Latin “Semper”, always referring to their durability and reliability.

We continue with the names that AMD has given to its CPUs with the famous Phenom , whose safe name that you already imagine comes from “phenomenon”, and is that they really were a phenomenon at the time they reached the market, especially for its excellent performance and potential for overclocking.

We have saved for last the names used in modern CPUs, such as Core on the Intel side and Ryzen on the AMD side. As for Intel Core processors, basically the manufacturer limited itself to calling them as the nomenclature of its Core architecture without more, and they do not have any deep or significant meaning (worth the redundancy) beyond that they were introduced in the era in which processors began to have multiple cores, since Core means core in English.

Procesador AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

The name Ryzen is somewhat more complicated, or deeper depending on how you want to see it. Obviously the suffix -zen refers to AMD’s Zen architecture, but what about RY-? AMD has never discussed the meaning of this name, but we can understand it in two different ways; -ry as a prefix can come from re, which means “again” or “again”, as if to say “we are back” which is indeed what Ryzen meant for AMD: the return to the market and competitiveness with Intel. In English RY can also be used as a suffix (and not as a prefix) which is a contraction of -ery, which in this case would mean something like “the Zen saga” altogether.

The code names of the processors

The names in code, names in code or “codenames” in English are used to name the microarchitectures or generations of processors, fundamentally. For example, we have seen names of cities (like Barcelona) or of mountains, rivers, lakes, volcanoes or even things (like Bulldozer) in the case of AMD that seem to have no concrete meaning. For example, in the past AMD has used names like Palomino, Corvette, Rhea, Zeus etc., but the only ones that really did have any meaning were the brand’s Kryptonite processors (the AMD K5, K7, etc.), since they pretended that it was the “Kryptonite” (the famous element that weakens Superman) from Intel.

As for Intel we return to the same, the code names of its generations such as Sandy Bridge, Haswell or Rocket Lake have no intrinsic meaning beyond giving their architectures a proper name.

The hidden works of art in CPUs

Here we enter the field of curiosities. Now it is rare to see something like this, but in the past what was called ” Silicon Art ” (also known as chip graffiti or silicon doodling) was used which consisted of hiding works of art in the chips, usually in the frames near the pads. It is an art almost on a microscopic level that not many people know but that was quite fashionable at the time. For example, in the following image you can see a buffalo created on a HP3582a IC chip.

Buffalo_chip

This type of decorative art does not make much sense for users since it is something that cannot be seen with the naked eye, not to mention that it would be necessary to remove the IHS from the chip to be able to see it and then have to use a microscope, but not because this is no longer a curiosity. These designs are engraved during the manufacturing process, that is, the lithographic machines themselves engrave them on the chips, so these “easter eggs” come from the chip design itself.

Excavadora en un chip

In the past, these Silicon Art made certain sense since they were used as a kind of watermark to detect counterfeits and copyright violations (if the competition copied a chip this could serve to obtain evidence of it), but since 1984 it entered The Semiconductor Chip Protection Art Act came into force in the US and this stopped making any sense. However, it is still the sea of curious, right?